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Yesterday on "Face The Nation," retired Gen. Wesley Clark, an advocate for Barack Obama, said, "I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."

He was taking about presumptive GOP nominee John McCain, whom he had earlier complimented as "a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands of millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war." Despite that service, Clark said, McCain "hasn't held executive responsibility."

"That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded wasn't a wartime squadron," Clark said. "[McCain] hasn't been there and ordered the bombs to fall." In another interview, Clark called McCain "untested and untried."

This morning, the McCain campaign held a conference call to respond to Clark's comments. The campaign said the purpose of the call was to launch the "McCain Truth Squad" – "a new group aimed at countering the recent attacks on John McCain’s military record."

Sen. John Warner, POWs Col. Bud Day and Lt.Col. Orson Swindle, McCain foreign policy advisor Bud McFarland, and Carl Smith, a retired Navy pilot who served with McCain, participated in the call.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers stopped short of calling on Obama to condemn Clark's remarks, though he said "it would be great" if Obama did. (Warner suggested that Obama apologize to McCain for Clark's comments.)

The participants in the call suggested that the Obama campaign was orchestrating comments of this type concerning McCain's record.

"If the opposing candidate doesn't really have experience or knowledge of depth in international affairs, then one approach can be, I suppose, to deny that Sen. McCain does," said McFarland.

"The Obama campaign seemed to be soliciting these kinds of attacks from surrogates," said Swindle.

"It's clear there's a pattern here," added Rogers. "It's not an isolated incident."

Invoked on the call were comments by senior Obama advisor Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, who said that McCain was a "skinny kid" after being released from a POW camp but has "done very well at the dinner table in Washington."

Day, who was a member of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, said that he is "well aware of what the commencement of these kind of personal attacks can lead to."

"John was slandered and reviled in the 2000 campaign in a way that denigrated his service enormously, and in my view was probably one of the reasons why he was not the President of the United States in 2000," he said.

Swindle suggested that comments about McCain's record were designed to confuse "those who do not know better" – among them the young voters who support Obama.

UPDATE: Obama just said this during a speech on patriotism in Independence, Missouri:

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In a debate last Thursday, Barack Obama told a story about an Army captain in Afghanistan who said his platoon was short on supplies and manpower.

"They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief," Obama said.

The Pentagon denied the account, and Republican Sen. John Warner sent Obama a letter demanding the captain's name so the situation could be investigated. (The Obama campaign, citing the captain's privacy, refused to release it.)

Now Army chief of staff Gen. George Casey, who was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he has "no reason to doubt" the account, according to the Associated Press. He did question the notion than any shortages would have kept soldiers from fulfilling their mission, however.

"This was 2003 and 2004, almost four and a half years ago," Casey said. "We acknowledge and all worked together to correct the deficiencies that we saw in that period, not only in Afghanistan but in Iraq. It was a period that we worked our way through."

Casey said the Army hasn't tried to seek the captain out, the AP notes, though he said he did contact the platoon's brigade commander.

"There may have been some spot shortages in spare parts and ammunition," he said. "But the commander said that there were never a shortage of ammunition that impacted the units ability to accomplish its mission."